In recent years, the ‘right to the city’ has emerged as a key concept and practice amongst both academics and social movements around which to organise a response to the crisis of Fordist production and political representation. In Spain this response has taken to the streets, with millions of people coming together and shouting ‘They don’t represent us!’. As a key site of both neoliberal urban governance and political insurgency, Barcelona provides a powerful site through which to examine the relationships between urban social movements, urban governance and struggles around the right to the city. In this thesis I build a (partial and provisional) genealogy of the right to the city, examining the relevance of those struggles that have emerged inside and against neoliberal governmentality since the early 1980s in an effort to assemble the right to the city through the material combination of struggles around urban production and citizenship rights. To do this, I return to the relation between genesis and management as an uneven dialectic in the production of rights; drawing on and building new connections between post-colonial studies, autonomous marxist debates, critical studies of citizenship and urban studies to investigate how strangers, outsiders and the governed challenge European capitalism from inside and assert a different imagination of contemporary urban life. I also explore my own role in these dynamics. In contrast to an understanding of academic knowledge as analytical and objective representation, my position as both a militant and a researcher provides the ground upon which I analyse social movements as a factory of concepts and practices capable of assembling an instituent politics against neoliberal governmentality.

The major objective of my thesis was to understand why sectors of the reconstructed anarcho-syndicalist trade union, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, were addressing concerns which were identical to sectors of the Marxist Left in other countries of Europe, For my views on anarchism had been informed by a Marxist interpretation of anarchism, which rested on the assumption that anarchism was an agrarian, and/or a petit bourgeois philopsopy which could have little relevance in advanced industrial societies. This anomaly - my experience of anarchist militants within the CUT, and the vision of anarchism expounded by "classical" Marxism - led me to undertake an historical study of the Spanish anarchist movement and a theoretical study of Marxist and anarchist thought. Moreover, in order to understand the demands of the anarchists and the CNT during the 1960's and 1970's, I had to thoroughly study the developments which had taken place within the workers' and student movements during the Francoist period, and the nature of the CUT organisation in exile, factors which would bear heavily on the CNT's attempt at reconstruction. Through extensive interviewing and the use of documents, I tried to piece together the process of anarchist re-emergence in Spain from the mid-1960s, and the nature of the reconstruction of the CUT during the political transition to democracy in Spain in 1976-1979. The overall theme of my thesis centres on the relationship between Marxism and anarchism, and their relationship to historical development and tradition. By emphasising the importance of historical tradition - the political aspect most sorely underestimated in both Marxist and anarchist thought - I hope my thesis will contribute towards the possibility of a more realisable socialist utopia.

Equality is part of the European policy and legislation. However there are still evident signs of women being treated unequally in the labour market. The aim of the thesis is to answer the question if women are more vulnerable to economic shocks in terms of wage distribution. The focus will be on women in Spain in the context of the financial crisis of 2008. The thesis examines the evolution of the salary structure in the period 2002-2014 using the microdata of the Structural Earning Survey. The taste-based and the statistical discrimination theory are going to be described in order to explain the causes of gender wage discrimination. The methods applied in this paper are the Mincer method, which explains the human capital theory and the Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions, which separates the gender wage gap into explained and unexplained parts. The results from the study suggest that there is a decrease in the gender wage gap in Spain following the situation before and after the crisis.

This dissertation contributes to the understanding of sixteenth-century vernacular Bible translation by means of a comparative analysis of seven editions of the Old and New Testaments in Spanish: the New Testament (1543) of Francisco de Enzinas, the Old Testament (1553) in two editions by Abraham Usque and Yom Tob Atias, the New Testament (1556) of Juan Pérez de Pineda, the complete Bible of Casiodoro de Reina, the New Testament of Cipriano de Valera (1596) and Valera's revision of Reina's Bible (1602). These Spanish Bibles reflect both general trends in sixteenth-century scholarship and translation and the specific circumstances of Spanish Evangelicals and their communities in exile. In their prefaces, the motives and methods of the Spaniards for producing Bible translations are similar to those of Luther, Calvin, or Coverdale, yet there is a unique Spanish pride evident as well. The translations themselves provide examples both of a deliberately wooden, non-literary approach as well as a literary, pre-modern critical approach to translation. The Spaniards also negotiated questions of political and religious authority in their prefaces, though philological concerns are also important, especially for Reina and Valera. A close examination of the Spanish texts clearly shows a direct line of descent from Enzinas to Pérez and on to Reina and Valera, with each borrowing substantially from the previous translation. The Complutensian Polyglot (1520) and Erasmus' Novum Instrumentum (1516) as well as the traditional Vulgate influenced the Spanish translators, though not to the exclusion of their own independent judgment and their use of other vernacular translations such as the French of Olivétan. These earlier models of scholarship influenced the first translations of Enzinas, Usque-Atias, and Pérez, but after the middle of the sixteenth century Reina and Valera became increasingly reliant on the Genevan biblical scholarship pioneered by Theodore Beza. Despite the context in which Reina worked, distinctly Lutheran renderings left virtually no mark on the Spanish Bible tradition. As the confessional boundaries of Protestant factions hardened, so did the theological orientation of the Spanish Bibles. The irenic humanism of Enzinas gave way to the Calvinism reflected in Cipriano de Valera's translation.

Medieval Iberian literary tradition constitutes a vast corpus of writings with which to study interfaith relations – in particular, Christian attitudes towards Muslims. This thesis focuses on works produced in the thirteenth century under king Alfonso X of Castile-Leon. Scholars have often looked to Alfonso X's poetry and legal texts to explore Christian responses to Islam, at a pivotal moment of Christian domination in the Peninsula. The thesis looks to Alfonso's historiography (the Estoria de España), which has received much less attention from scholars of interfaith relations. This study employs a historical-critical method of interpretation to explore the transmission and reformulation of Christian society's attitudes towards Islam. It offers a sophisticated analysis of the narratives of three prominent figures in the history of Spanish Islam: a) the Prophet Muhammad, b) Ibn Abi Amir al-Mansur, and c) King al- Mamun of Toledo. The study reveals the wide-ranging and contrasting attitudes towards Muslims visible not only in the writings of Alfonso X, but throughout the broader historiography and literature of medieval Spain. The thesis explains how these contradictions are rooted in the paradoxes of conflict and co-operation among the faiths in the Peninsula. It concludes that the ambivalence of Christian writers allows for the coexistence of both disdain and respect for Muslims in medieval society.

What happens in institutions like schools or hospitals when local service provision overlaps with the control of national borders? Such overlap is unavoidable if unlawful residents are to be excluded from mainstream public services. With this explicit aim, governments not only modify the rules and established practices of welfare provision, but also encourage the people who administer and deliver these services to incorporate the logic of immigration control into their everyday work. To identify and better understand the concrete mechanisms that either help or hinder such internalisation of immigration control, this study systematically compares three spheres of service provision – healthcare, education and social assistance – across two distinctive legal-political environments: Barcelona/Spain and London/UK. Looking at official policies as well as their implementation, it primarily draws on a total of almost 90 semi-structured interviews with irregular residents, providers and administrators of local services, and representatives of NGOs and local government. Its innovative analytical framework helps to map and explain the significant variation in how immigration control works within different institutions and how individual actors occupying key positions in these can reproduce, contest, or readjust formal structures of inclusion and exclusion. While the way in which national – but also sub-national – governments frame and address irregular migration plays an important role, certain sectors of welfare provision and some categories of ‘street-level-bureaucrats' are generally more likely to internalise immigration control than others. This reflects different degrees of professionalisation and individual discretion, but also attachment to different institutional logics and objectives. Drawing on organisation theory, the study also traces institutional responses to these external demands, which are key to understand the varying degrees of internal resistance. The thesis offers an original and empirically grounded perspective on the consequences and inherent limitations of internalised control and contributes to general debates on the effectiveness of immigration policy.

Luiz Francisco Rebello e Alfonso Sastre: o teatro de resistência sob os regimes fascistas ibéricos tem como objetivo pesquisar e analisar a literatura dramática desses dois artistas e escritores contemporâneos, representantes de suas gerações literárias, que produziram peças originais, perturbadoras, mordazes, engajadas ideologicamente contra os regimes autoritários da península ibérica e, por esse fato, foram sistematicamente censurados. O trabalho tem como objeto a produção dramática de Francisco Rebello e Alfonso Sastre entre os anos de 1944 e 1974, anos marcados pela repressão e censura do fascismo ibérico, assim como, pelo fim da segunda grande guerra, pela iminência da Guerra Fria, pela ameaça nuclear e pelo drástico cerceamento à liberdade durante os governos totalitários de Portugal e Espanha. Faremos observar alguns aspectos históricos, sociais e políticos da contínua decadência peninsular deste período, questões que aproximam ambos escritores ainda mais, e que enfaticamente influenciaram na formação dos temas, nas concepções artísticas e nas literárias dos dramas desses dois autores de povos vizinhos. Um panorama da vida e obra de cada autor, em seu respectivo contexto histórico, fez-se aqui necessário para vislumbrar o percurso realizado por cada um deles e o desenvolvimento de suas respectivas produções literárias. Testemunhas comprometidas com esse período fascista ibérico, Francisco Rebello e Alfonso Sastre, ao término da II Guerra Mundial, no prelúdio literário de suas vidas, decidiram criar uma dramaturgia de vanguarda e resistência. Peças teatrais, frutos do inconformismo de uma época conturbada e repressora; obras características de um teatro que apostava em mudanças e, sobretudo, buscava alguma reação sinestésica de suas respectivas sociedades. / Luiz Francisco Rebello and Alfonso Sastre: the theater of opposition under Iberian fascist regimes aims to research and analyze the dramatic literature of these two contemporary artists and writers, representatives of their literary generations, which produced original pieces, disturbing, spicy, ideologically engaged against the authoritarian regimes of the Iberian Peninsula, and this fact, systematically censored. The work is focused on the dramatic production of Francisco Rebello and Alfonso Sastre between the years 1944 and 1974, years marked by the collective Iberian fascism, by the end of the Second World War, the imminence of the Cold War, the nuclear threat and the drastic curtailment of freedom during the totalitarian governments of Portugal and Spain. We will look at some historical, social and political decay of the continuous period of peninsular issues that bring both further and strongly influenced the formation of the themes of artistic and literary conceptions of the tragedies of these two authors of their neighbours. A wide panel of life and work of each author in their respective historical context, it was necessary to glimpse here the route taken by each of them and develop their literary productions. Witnesses committed to this Iberian fascist period, Francisco Rebello and Alfonso Sastre, at the end of World War II, in the prelude of their literary lives, decided to create a vanguard and opposition theater. Plays, result of the nonconformity of a tumultuous and repressive time; works features a drama, which believed on changes and, especially, tried some synaesthetic reaction of their respective companies.

Spain in My Heart: Songs of the Spanish Civil War. 2014. Written and compiled by Jürgen Schebera. Bear Family Records, book, CDs (7), DVD, BCD 16093.

This dissertation examines the fascist propaganda for children produced in Hitler’s Germany and the early years of Franco’s Spain. The central aim of this project is to identify the formation of fascist discourse and its construction of political “reality” (or what Kaja Silverman calls a “dominant fiction”) by German and Spanish propagandistic authors. I will also determine the extent to which the fascist thought formed in the works I am studying depends on the national context in which it appears. The fascist children’s literature produced in Germany and Spain provides a body of writing that will allow me to answer if there are literary elements specific to the historical moment and national context in which they were produced, or if fascist writing is the same from one country to the next. For the German context, I will begin by examining works written for children during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933). By placing works from Erich Kästner and Wolf Durian into a historical context, I read these books as cultural artifacts that express the views of their authors and reflect those of many democratic supporters of the Republic. Beginning with the first Nazi novels for children and youth that appeared in 1932, I proceed to trace the elements National Socialist authors chose to retain from their left-wing Weimar counterparts, and then put forth a model that explains the influence fascism had on children’s literature in Germany during this time. Once this model is established, I will compare and contrast this body of German writing with the children’s literature produced in Spain between 1939 and 1943, the immediate post-Civil War period, a time-frame that most historians view as the moment when fascist ideology flourished under the emerging Franquist regime. Taking the fascist children’s periodical Flechas y Pelayos (Arrows and Pelayos) as a case in point, I demonstrate the ways in which Franco’s government sought to nationalize the family unit in order to place the children of Spain in the service of the new regime. Finally, I conclude the project by synthesizing my findings of both fascist contexts as they pertain to the creation of “realities” in children’s literature and the subsequent formation of the role of the state.

During the late Middle Ages, Iberian Christian and Jewish patrons commissioned intriguing monuments that incorporate Islamic-derived features. Determining possible reasons for the patronage of this architecture, commonly referred to as Mudejar architecture, has the potential to provide important insights into the complex, multi-cultural society that produced it, yet studies on its patronage have been limited in number and scope. Most of the early Spanish scholarship on Mudejar architecture focuses on formal issues and simply attributes its patronage to economic factors, an admiring fascination with the exotic, or a desire to subjugate Islamic culture. More recent scholarship has shifted to examining the motivations of patrons in specific case studies; however, many of these case studies are still framed within the overarching theory that Mudejar architecture was the result of a common architectural heritage among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. The reasons for Mudejar patronage cannot be confined to a single broad theory, but instead individual projects and patrons must be studied within their specific contexts and then compared to one another to provide a more accurate understanding of Mudejarismo. This dissertation traces the development of Mudejar architecture in Seville from the time of the city's conquest by Christian forces in 1248 to the early sixteenth century, just after the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from the Kingdom of Castile, in order to demonstrate the changing nature of Mudejar patronage in the city and how it relates to the relations among Christian, Jews, and Muslims. In establishing the chronology and the patronage of Seville's Mudejar monuments through a close analysis of their formal elements, three distinct phases in their construction become apparent: 1) the approximately fifty years following the city's conquest; 2) a period between the earthquake of 1356 and the initial construction of the Gothic cathedral in the 1430's; and 3) the remainder of the fifteenth century through the first years of the sixteenth century. Prevalent features of Mudejar architecture during each of these phases are considered within the socio-political climate of the time as evidenced in primary sources. While economic, social, and demographic factors contributed to the construction of Mudejar architecture in Seville, its patronage was largely the result of the changing political agendas of the city's ruling elite. Shortly after the city's Castilian conquest, Alfonso X favored Gothic over Mudejar features because of his goals of asserting the new Christian authority in a city still threatened by Muslim forces and creating for himself a cosmopolitan imperial image. By the mid-fourteenth century, when Christian hegemony was no longer a concern, Mudejar forms signified the absolute power desired by Pedro I and his rebellious half-brother Enrique II. The construction of Seville's enormous Gothic cathedral throughout much of the fifteenth century in addition to the patronage of the Catholic Monarchs and the rise of the Renaissance largely ended Mudejar patronage in the city with the exception of centrally-planned chapels and elaborate wooden roofs, which by this time had become a source of local pride. Thus, no general theory can encompass all of the reasons for Mudejar patronage in late medieval Seville, which were varied and continually in flux.